Producing your own fuel pellets with a home wood pellet mill has a lot of appeal to some individuals. Owning your own home wood pellet mill can bring several advantages. Firstly you can produce your own fuel from the resources you have available to you. This may be local sawdust, or even straws, grasses and even cardboard and paper. Producing your own fuel pellets cannot only bring a source of energy independence; it can also generate some additional income. Most small home wood pellet mills produce around 100 kilograms an hour. Since most homes only use between 3000 and 5000 kilograms in a year, even a small home wood pellet mill has the ability to produce much more than the owner would require. This brings some options, either the pellet mill could be a group purchase between an collection of pellet users, or one person could produce the pellets and sell the pellets back into the local area.

Pellet Mills for Home Use and Equipment

At BiofuelTech we provide a consultation service on pellet production equipment, including some pellet mills suitable for home use. To produce good quality pellets, your raw material requires certain properties. First it must be in small particles of either 6mm or below. The raw material must also be fairly dry. However some moisture is required for the pellet process to work. Finally to produce consistent quality pellets, it is important to provide the pellet mill with consistent quality raw material. In this sense pellet production is much like cooking, and will take a few tries to get it right. To find out more please visit the BiofuelTech website

Flat Die Pellet Mill and Small Pellet Mills

The most compact design of small pellet mill suitable as a home wood pellet mill is the flat die pellet mill. The flat die design pellet mill was the first design, used for animal feed pellet production. The design is very simple and compact; therefore it is possible to produce very basic versions for a home wood pellet mill.

The Wood Pellet Production Pellet Press

Producing wood pellets is not just always about only the pellet mill, it depends on what your raw materials is like. For example if you wish to process logs into pellets there are several stages of size reduction which must take place first. Firstly the log must go through a chipper. Once into chips, these must also be reduced in size, therefore the chips are then placed in a hammer mill. Through high speeds of the hammers impacting on the wood chips, the chips shatter into small particles. A hammer mill has an internal screen, to stop oversized particles from escaping the hammer mill until a 6mm particle size is achieved. The particles are then take from the base of the hammer mill by a fan and then separated from the air stream via a cyclone separator. The particles are now small enough for the pellet mill. However the particles must also be dry enough. There are several drying solutions used depending on the productivity required.

The two main drying solutions are pipe dryers and rotary drum dryers. Pipe dryers carry the wet particles in a hot air stream to remove moisture. Pipe dryers are a very cheap drying solution, however they cannot cope with high moisture content materials.